American mini-series television stealing Hollywood's thunder is not quite the hot-button topic that it was. Martin Scorsese's Boardwalk Empire turned out to be pretty middling, and, oh, how we laughed at the abysmal mini-series The Kennedys with its terrible dialogue, actors standing around like tailor's dummies in suits, looking down with their arms folded, and the elaborate Bawshtun accents. But now the small screen has landed a sledgehammer punch, with Todd Haynes's outrageously enjoyable new television adaptation of Mildred Pierce, starting this Saturday on Sky Atlantic. It's the story of a Depression-era American housewife and her ferocious battle to survive, based on the 1941 James M Cain novel, which was famously turned into an Oscar-winning Hollywood movie in 1945, starring Joan Crawford.

This glittering new Mildred Pierce, which features Kate Winslet in the title role, is frankly the crystal meth of quality TV: instantly and scarily addictive. It is not as dizzyingly self-aware as Haynes's great film masterpiece Far from Heaven – the tribute to Douglas Sirk that went beyond mere pastiche – but it is managed with the same confidence and passion, and Kate Winslet is better than ever. Her role in Sam Mendes's Revolutionary Road may have been the springboard for her performance here, but this is a real development: her Mildred is complex, sensitive, arrogant, wounded, an old-fashioned above-the-title star turn.

If Todd Haynes's Mildred Pierce was going out as a feature film, it would be a very big event, and even now I wonder if HBO could not put on a special epic-length theatrical release – a five-hour extravaganza, rather like Olivier Assayas's Carlos, that whoppingly long film that started life as a television series and just seemed to zip past in an instant.

The eventful novel was, in 1945, compacted and compressed into a film of beady-eyed intensity, and its flourishes of passion and violence burst forth from what seemed like a suppressed emotional darkness: it is an almost dream-like, surreal effect, which is part of what makes it linger in the mind. Todd Haynes, on the other hand, has the luxury of time, he tells you more, much more, about the day-to-day, hour-by-hour nature of Mildred Pierce's life; we get a clearer view of the context for the melodramatic events, and so the drama tips away from nightmare and noir, into something more daylit.

It looks a bit soapy, and yet the ordinariness and drabness Haynes goes to such lengths to portray in the opening episode only look soapy because they are happening on the small screen. On the big screen, these extended, low-key scenes would look like the most meticulous sort of realist artistry. The long sequences showing Mildred swallowing her pride and gradually learning how to survive as a waitress in a crummy restaurant are brilliant, mostly because little or nothing happens in the way of sensation and drama. We are shown how to make money on tips and Haynes even gives us a close-up on the bill (from which we learn the place is called "Christofur's") showing how this arrangement works.

It is from this accessible reality that the operatic drama springs, such as Mildred's face-slapping confrontations with her spoilt, mini-me daughter. Winslet is a far more sympathetic Mildred than Joan Crawford, though I admit there is the same hint of opera-queen camp.

I hope Haynes brings out another movie soon. My little reverie is that he will remake his 1988 short film Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story – which jokily used Barbie dolls – as a long, feature-length biopic, but using real actors this time. I was thinking Zooey Deschanel as Karen and Scott Caan as Richard. Haynes would be the right director to take the treatment beyond irony or camp into something with passion and rapture. Only Haynes could carry off the big set pieces, such as the Carpenters' show at the Nixon White House, with, say, Tom Wilkinson as the President. Well, I can only dream. Meanwhile, with his small-screen Mildred Pierce Haynes has, as they say, hit one out of the park.